ITAMAR GOV

In the Family of Things draws its name from Mary Oliver’s poem Wild Geese from 1986 and revolves around Gov’s continuous inquiry into cultural traditions, conventions and gestures that constitute individual and collective identities. Presenting a new body of work that varies in medium, material and scope, he explores the essence of different families of things—humans, animals, plants, objects, forms—extending beyond what is immediately visible, inviting us to give place to doubt and become part of an inquisitive process.

Cryptic figures gathered in what seems to be a celebratory moment, a frozen fragment of a herd of reindeer fleeing in panic, an army of motionless canes casting shadows based on the movement of a mechanic sun, delicate watercolors reproducing cartographic landscapes of human fingers, a neon work invoking a 17th-century ceramic plate found at the bottom of a river, wooden compositions of destroyed and yet-to-be-built castles, a sandbox full of revolutionary tools that attest their own failure - the different works of the exhibition, each by itself and all of them together, investigate the tension between what we know and what we assume.

Gov translates abstract notions of time and space into tangible experiences, reflecting on the flimsiness of our existence and the constant necessity to redefine our place within our intimate groups, the bigger society, and the world as a whole. Time, too, becomes malleable in his hands: it stretches, freezes, and loops back on itself, leaving traces of both what has passed and what might yet come.

In the Family of Things invites us to pause, to wonder, to feel the weight of history and the pull of the future. The works come together to form a realm in which childhood games and atrocities of war intertwine and become inseparable, moments of nostalgic intimacy intermingle with discomfort, destruction, and repair exist side by side, the personal is a mirror of the political, and history’s unlearned lessons linger in the air. As we move through the exhibition and allow doubt to take its place, we are reminded, over and over, of our place in the family of things.